The Fox Juggernaut: Why It’s No. 1

Those who like to bury their heads in the sand won’t want to read this. This is about Fox News and its march over the nation’s news media, knocking off and steam-rolling other news channels while cementing its stranglehold at the top.

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Most of us who live in the blessedly enlightened Washington-New York-Boston corridor like to brush off Fox News as the home of the intellectually challenged. We mock its slogan, “First, Fair and Balanced,” and laugh off its rabble-rousing commentators as neanderthal, bigoted, biased right-wingers.

Fox’s millions of viewers — those little people in nowhere towns and backwater cities who don’t read books or watch “Mad Men” — are ridiculed and caricatured as dumb and dumber. They are the hollering, red-faced crowds in the rowdy protests at town hall meetings last August. They are the social and political throwbacks of the Tea Party movement. They are the unfashionable, middle-America, small-town folks who queue up for hours to get a glimpse of their action hero, Sarah Palin.